hound-search/hound

Index is apparently limited to 4 GB

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#351 opened on Oct 1, 2020

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 (7 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)JavaScript (5,470 stars) (606 forks)batch import
enhancementhelp wanted

Description

:wave: Hound developers!

I am trying to index a pretty large repo (144GB - all current sources of openSUSE), and unsurprisingly the index turns out to be larger than 4GB, thus I hit this fatal message:

https://github.com/hound-search/hound/blob/e3b1b43eb872e47af1de1b0e15d0ec3ac5c51dc4/codesearch/index/write.go#L561

Would it be possible / how hard would it be to support larger indexes?

I only had a brief look at read.go and it seems to me that 32 bit offsets are part of the index file format, so changing that would require re-indexing/converting/supporting two file formats, is that correct?

Thanks for all your efforts on Hound!

Contributor guide

Tech stack
go
Domain
backendsearch
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
Go programming languageunderstanding of binary file formatsfamiliarity with Hound's index packageexperience with backward compatibility
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
15
Research direction
The issue is about supporting indexes larger than 4GB by changing the offset size from 32 bit to 64 bit in the index file format. Key files are codesearch/index/write.go (line 561) and read.go. The challenge is backward compatibility; consider supporting two file formats or a migration path. Review the 7 comments in the issue for any suggested approaches or known constraints. No linked PRs exist, so the solution may require designing a new version of the index format.